Innovation in Language Learning

Most picture books targeted at children (young or in primary school) tend to be based on single picture presentations. One picture illustrates an entity or an action or a property and a word is associated to this picture. This mode of teaching novel words reduces word learning to an association learning task in which the word underlying concept would come up automatically. As we know, this is far from being the case: children produce numerous extension errors (e.g., under- or over-generalizations). There is now ample evidence that the opportunity to compare several exemplars to the same target category name (e.g., several apples rather than one apple) gives better results in terms of word extension (e.g., Augier & Thibaut, 2013). Comparisons promote extensions that are based on deep semantic commonalities rather than on superficial features. The central idea is that comparisons are invitations to align objects on many properties, starting on easily accessible ones and, later, with deeper conceptually based regularities. In this paper, we will review the evidence regarding the role of comparisons in novel word learning. We will also review several conceptions of comparison effects such as progressive alignment or concreteness fading. We will suggest in which learning situations these different comparison modes might be most effective. We will suggest how picture books devoted to word learning might be improved and implemented in e-learning.

Keywords: Word learning, children, vocabulary, meaning, comparison, extension;